Let’s Talk About Building the Innovation School
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Building the Innovation School: Infrastructures for Equity in Today’s Classrooms
T. Philip Nichols, 2022
On Thursday, April 10, we will be hosting a book club on Building the Innovation School. You can register for that on our events page.
As a preview of that conversation, in today’s blog post we share an interview that Jacob Pleasants conducted with author Phil Nichols about the book.
If you are unfamiliar with the book, here is the description that appears on the publisher’s website:
There is no shortage of innovations on offer for schools. Hardly a week passes without someone marching out the latest device, app, service, curricular add-on, or instructional technique that, we are told, is sure to cure the perennial woes of systemic education. This book is an investigation of this enchantment with “innovation” and its implications for not only everyday teaching and learning, but also the future of public education. Based on a study of The Innovation School—a public high school organized around makerspaces, design thinking, and personalized technology—the author challenges conventional wisdom about how educational transformation unfolds and argues that the popular understanding of innovation exacerbates inequality and undermines teacher and student autonomy. Building the Innovation School demonstrates how attending to the infrastructures of innovation leads to educational change that is driven by the interests and values of educators. Repair rather than disruption is the focus—a commitment to schools that allow all students to flourish.
Jacob Pleasants: Let’s start with the origin story of the book. The book is based on a research partnership where you were embedded in a secondary school for several years. You’ve published several articles about the work you did there, so this book is not the first thing you've written about your experiences. Walk me through what you wanted to do with the book, and how you built on the work that you had done leading up to it.
Phil Nichols: One important thing is the context the partnership grew out of. A lot of times “innovation” is a response to some kind of crisis. This particular partnership grew out of a crisis in Philadelphia in 2012 and 2013. There was a massive set of neighborhood school closures, and there was a lot of public outcry about what was going to be offered in place of all those neighborhood schools that were closing. The district’s response was to open a handful of what it called “Innovation Schools” that were going to have different models, different ways of structuring the school day, different ways of doing asynchronous learning.
At the time, research-practice partnerships with schools in the district were actually pretty tricky to do. You couldn't get access to schools unless you were doing studies that aligned with the district’s targeted priorities like, say, “third grade reading.” But in this case, the district was interested in trying to understand what was happening with these “Innovation School” experiments. And so, my Ph.D. supervisor, Amy Stornaiuolo, managed to get a research partnership approved, and it was from that that this particular study originated.
At the outset, I didn’t know that it was going to be a study about “innovation,” broadly. It was going to be about teaching and learning in school-based “makerspaces” — which were supposed to be the Innovation School’s core innovation. Makerspaces were a pretty hot idea at the time: students at this school were going to be “design thinking” and “learning by doing” in these interdisciplinary spaces, and the hope was that this would revitalize content-area learning by making it more hands-on and self-directed.
But even in the lead-up to the school’s opening — like, sitting in professional planning with teachers the summer before it opened — I started to see that there wasn’t just one “innovation” being advanced by the school, but multiple. Or, maybe another way to say it would be: implementing the innovation of makerspaces required many other innovations in how the school day was structured, how class instruction was organized, how standards were implemented, how assessment worked, and how technologies could be used to support all of this. At some point in those meetings, I realized, “Oh, I’m sort of losing the thread of which ‘innovation’ people are referring to when they use the term.” And that made me curious about how these different innovations, and different ideas about innovation, actually worked together — or maybe against each other — when they were embedded in real classrooms, with real teachers and real students, and real stakes for everyone involved. Rather than trying to understand whether an innovation, like school-based makerspaces, was effective, the study gradually evolved to be more about “innovation” itself — what we mean by the term, why we reach for it as a solution to educational problems, and how it shapes the conditions for equitable learning in everyday school life.
Those are big and complicated questions, in part, because they are about the relationship between two different things: “innovation” as a discourse (something we talk about and have beliefs about) and “innovation” as a material practice (something we do, or remake our worlds to accommodate). And I realized pretty early in the process of converting my dissertation study into publishable journal articles that capturing this relationship would be difficult to do, meaningfully, in articles alone. So as you mentioned, I wrote several articles that explored parts of the relationship — some geared toward researchers, others toward practitioners — but ultimately, I knew that if I wanted to assemble those pieces into a coherent statement about how “innovation” gets put to work in schools, and the implications for equitable education, it would have to take the form of a book.
JP: So in the prior articles that you've published, you looked at smaller cases of these things happening. The book, then, is more of a zoomed out view of the phenomenon that you were part of. Is that how you look at it?
PN: Yeah, I think that's right. Though that probably makes the process sound a bit tidier than it was. I didn’t really know what I had to say about “innovation,” in a zoomed-out sense, apart from the specifics of the smaller cases; and likewise, the smaller cases were only recognizable to me as “cases” because I could identify them as instantiations of some zoomed-out sense of “innovation” — at least, as the people in the school talked about it. I guess that’s a way of saying, there’s some common ground that is tread in both the articles and the book, but the book is definitely where I had the space to paint a picture of how the zoomed-out and zoomed-in views of “innovation” bumped against each other in classrooms, and over time.
JP: In the book, you build on a long research tradition around school reform, but specifically center the idea of “innovation.” Where do you see the linkages to the prior scholarship on reform, and how do you think about innovation in relation to that prior work?
PN: There are a few traditions that I see this book drawing on and contributing to. One strand includes works like Larry Cuban and David Tyack’s Tinkering Toward Utopia, which points out that the most influential “innovations” in school reform are those that we don’t think about as innovative anymore. Things like air conditioning and school lunch and sex education were (and, in some cases, continue to be) hard-fought wins by reformers, but once inaugurated, they became taken-for-granted enough that they no longer appear, to most people, as “innovations.” Another strand includes works like Powell, Farrar, and Cohen’s The Shopping Mall High School, which looked at how seemingly anodyne innovations — like the drive to implement more “choice” into school classes and subject matter — can, in practice, have uneven implications for students and for education as a public institution. David Cohen was actually a mentor of mine while I was working on this study, and he was instrumental in helping me make sense of the continuities, as well as the differences, between the forms of “innovation” he was studying and those I was seeing.
Another tradition comes from outside of education, but I think it resonates with the lineages I just mentioned, and that is the scholarship on “infrastructure” in Science and Technology Studies. I have a background in the history and sociology of science, and one of the the key insights from this field is that technoscientific knowledge — including what counts as an “innovation” — is a contingent social achievement, held together by instruments, practices, rituals, and bids for consensus, prestige, and power. Susan Leigh Star’s theorization of “infrastructure” provides some language for talking about these forces and their interplay even in mundane, everyday occurrences.
As I said, I see these traditions as speaking to one another. Just as Cuban and Tyack helped show how school reforms can become infrastructural, fading into the background as we set our eyes on newer and flashier innovations, Powell, Farrar, and Cohen demonstrate that changes in the infrastructure of schooling have material, uneven, and often surprising effects on those who encounter them. So something I was trying to do in this book is to bring studies of school reform, innovation, and infrastructure into conversation.
For me, doing so helps reframe our questions about innovation and education somewhat. Since the book was published, I often get asked to give talks and workshops about innovation, and one of the most frequent questions I hear is, “So what is innovation?” I usually respond — maybe unsatisfyingly for those asking! — that thinking infrastructurally helps us see that what innovation is is less important than what innovation does. Many things enter schools under the auspices of being “innovative” — technically speaking, it is an innovation — however, what it does, the changes it makes, and for whom, may be very different from what was originally sold to us, or what we expected to see when we adopted it.
Thinking infrastructurally allows us to approach reforms not as silver bullets or once-and-done implementations, but things that require continual attention — before, during, and after they are attempted — to make sure they are living up to their promises and serving all students. Deep down, my hope is that this book makes it easier for education, as a field, not to get swept up in whatever the latest innovation-of-the-day is (e.g., MOOCs, makerspaces, the metaverse, generative AI) and, instead, to respond with questions: What is actually being changed by this thing? How do we account for these changes? What new challenges might these changes introduce? And for whom? Would addressing those challenges exacerbate, or distract us from addressing, other already-existing challenges related to quality, equitable education? And so on.
JP: It's very hard thing to do because innovation is in the eye of the beholder. Like you mentioned, you look the things that were once considered innovative and they now just seem mundane. One of the ideas you really take on in this book is that there’s this shelf of innovations that you can just pick up and install into a system in some additive way. We often see claims that plugging in these innovations will “enhance learning.” We encounter this idea in so many places around education. I think about of “stuff that research says works,” which gives this impression of techniques in isolation. It’s the “What Works Clearinghouse.” You don't come out and necessarily name those particular things, but it feels like you have those in your sights as you're writing about innovation. Am I reading you accurately?
PN: Yeah, that's very perceptive. For lots of historical and cultural reasons, when people hear the word “innovation” they tend to think immediately about technology — and computing technologies, in particular. Something I tried to be intentional about in laying out the chapters of the book is drawing attention to the different kinds of “innovative” techniques that converge in schools. These certainly include computing technologies (and I spend a considerable amount of time talking about these), but also things like the spatial arrangement of classrooms, the organization of curriculum units, and the ways we assess students. I’d count the “best practices” you mention among these techniques as well.
There’s a temptation to treat these innovations in isolation — as you said, as something “additive” that we can insert into practice and see immediate results. The problem with this is that innovations never exist in isolation. New innovations are always grafted onto schools and classrooms that are brimming with other innovations — some newer, and some that are so old and taken-for-granted we don’t even see them as innovations any longer. When we take an additive approach to innovation, we can miss the ways that whatever we’re adding may have some fundamental incompatibilities with these other innovations already at work in our context. Or it may require us to make changes to accommodate it that have unforeseen impacts on teachers and students. This is where I think the concept of “infrastructure” can be really useful. It gives us language to talk about why so many innovations — even those backed by research, or that feel intuitively right — can fail to take root, or live up to their promises, in practice.
JP: One of the parts of the book that really stuck with me was the first infrastructure that you describe in depth: the imaginative infrastructure. It’s this beautiful idea about how people bring different visions of what these different innovations mean. So we have this school that’s setting up different makerspaces, and people have different pictures in their heads of what a “makerspace” is. And at the school, some of these makerspaces are not filled with machines and tools and things like that. And there are some students who feel like they've cheated because here they are at this innovation school and they were expecting piles of tech. It just lays bare the conflicting images that people have in their heads. When you were in the school, watching these conflicts of imagination go down, what was running through your mind?
PN: Those conflicts are definitely easier to recognize and understand with the benefit of distance. As they were happening, I wasn’t thinking about competing “imaginative infrastructures” at work in the school, I was experiencing them as frustrations from students and teachers that I cared about and that cared about each other. It wasn’t easy to hear students voice their unmet expectations because each one of them had taken a huge risk in enrolling in a new, untested “innovation” high school in hopes that it would be better than other options they faced in the district. It also wasn’t easy to watch teachers field these complaints after they had spent months trying to build a school structure and climate where students could thrive and feel cared for. So, in the moment, I was mostly just aware of the frictions between these perspectives.
Later, stepping outside of those moments, I had more distance to really think about the source of those frictions. In infrastructure studies, Susan Leigh Star says that “infrastructure” often isn’t visible to us until it breaks down. We don’t think much about plumbing in our day-to-day lives until there’s a leak or a clog. So when I was analyzing the data I collected from my time at the school, I tried to be attentive to those moments of “break down” — the points of friction — and to make sense of what infrastructures they might be evidence of. And that was how I started to think about the different ways that the imagination was playing an infrastructural role in shaping how students and teachers were inhabiting the school and interacting with one another.
This was a really useful finding for me because it gave me some language to talk about these frictions without feeling compelled to reduce them to a singular cause. Sometimes education research — maybe all research — can fall into this trap of leaning too heavily on rehearsed explanations for complex phenomena. When a student is upset or disappointed, for instance, we might interpret this through the lens of a teacher’s, or school’s, or system’s failure to treat them with dignity and respect. And in many cases, this may be true. But sometimes there is something more, and more interesting, happening. Approaching the tensions at the Innovation School through the lens of “imaginative infrastructure” allowed me to consider how the concept of “innovation” itself positions students and teachers (and administrators) in these antagonistic relations by promising different things to each of them, and making it feel like each has let the other down when these promises don’t materialize. It helped me to see how simply blaming the challenges that arose in the school on students or teachers or administrators would allow the concept of “innovation” to evade scrutiny for its role in structuring these frictions.
JP: One thing you highlight is how the infrastructures of the school suited some students really well and they thrived with it. Elsewhere, though, there were misalignments between the school and the students, which is not to say that the students were deficient. But then you saw the school try to meet these different groups of students by creating different pathways, which ended up as a hierarchy. It reveals a central puzzle, because it's really hard to make a single infrastructure serve everyone, and it's really hard to make parallel infrastructures not become hierarchical. Can you tell me about how you wrestled with that as you saw it happen?
PN: From the outset, one aim of the school was for students to become “autonomous” learners. At the beginning of each year, there was a process called “unschooling,” which was designed to defamiliarize the framework of school and to introduce students to the new ways they would be learning there: working asynchronously through the curriculum, moving at their own pace, being evaluated by competencies, and so on. As you noticed, some students immediately lit up. For them, it felt freeing:“I’m really interested in music. Or film. And here, I can use these things I’m passionate about to demonstrate my understanding.” But as you say, not everyone immediately took to it. Conversations with these students went more like, “I don’t know what my teachers really want or expect from me. I don’t make music or movies like other kids, so how do I succeed here?”
This is where the hierarchy you mentioned first began to emerge. Even though the school used competency-based assessments, and was trying to flatten the hierarchies that conventional grades can impose, almost immediately a new, ad hoc classification system began to take shape — the students who “get it” and those who “don’t get it.” At first, this was just a shorthand that some educators were using to indicate which students seemed more or less enthusiastic about the school model, but over time, those categories became more fixed. Eventually, students were formally assigned to a classroom that was either “semi-autonomous,” “teacher-supported,” or “teacher directed.”
In theory, structuring classes like this, based on how much support students need, doesn’t have to be hierarchical as long as those different classifications are understood to signal different learning conditions, not a ranked order. But because the school emphasized the value of autonomous learning, the students quickly recognized the designations as a hierarchy. It became pretty common to hear people talking about moving “up” to the semi-autonomous class or moving “down” to the teacher-directed one. So the innovative structure became a kind of reinvention of tracking, but with different terms attached.
But there’s another important difference from conventional tracking, and that is what is being evaluated. In a normal, tracked system students might have some sense of the “rules” for how they will be sorted. If they get good grades, they may be recommended to move into an honors course; and if they don’t, they may be reassigned to a remedial class. However, in an “teacher-supported” class, the rules are less clear. A students’ ability to work autonomously isn’t always aligned with the quality of what they produce; and vice versa. So over time a new “hidden curriculum” can start to emerge that evaluates students on their dispositions rather than what they produce. What began as a way to boost transparency for how students are assessed made certain parts of their evaluation murkier and, therefore, harder to navigate if they wished to move up the new hierarchy that was emerging. As you say: it gets at a real puzzle of how infrastructures can address inequities, but also, in the process, create new ones.
JP: What hits me here is that there’s an assumption that all students should be in this autonomous mode. And yet when you really step back and think about it, is it true that all students really should or want to be in that mode? I mean, some students thrive in a different setting and that should be fine. But then, acknowledging different paths grates against the notion of innovation, where the innovation is regarded as the “good.” If you get with the innovation, that’s good. But if you have frictions with this innovation, that’s bad and you must adapt. It’s kind of a classic story of demanding humans to adapt.
PN: Definitely. I think there’s a “means” and “ends” conflation that often happens in conversations about educational innovation, where something that holds promise as a means toward some outcome gets converted into an endpoint. Conversations about AI in education have been a good example of this. Regardless of where you fall on the topic, it was pretty stunning to watch conversations in education abruptly turn from something we might cautiously experiment with (AI as a “means”) to something we need to teach students to use lest they be unprepared for the future (AI as an “end”).
Something I try to emphasize in the book is that this gets especially thorny when this “end” contradicts other “ends” that we also hold dear. For instance, it’s common to hear people say that we want students to be independent learners, but it's equally common to hear that we want them to be collaborative. If we take both of these aims at face-value, we may not be attuned to the ways our instructional decisions geared toward the former may actually be undercutting the latter. To me, this is another area where infrastructural thinking can be very useful. It can help us to think about how the supports that are required to meet different aims can work together, or against each other. And in the process, it can also make us aware of frictions that can prompt us to reflect on, and better articulate, what it is that we are trying to accomplish as educators.
JP: That makes me think of an idea you introduce early in the book, which are imperatives. You point out that all of our infrastructures have imperatives, which are these ways of acting that they make easier or more difficult. That’s how you get these situations of either congruity or misalignment between the infrastructure and what people are trying to do. It seems like when we talk about technology or any other innovative practice, what people often overlook are the imperatives.
PN: Yes, definitely. And I’d go further and say that because people tend to overlook imperatives altogether, we also miss important opportunities to consider variations in how people and places respond to them.
If you’ll forgive a little historical detour: some of the research I did for this project that never made it into the book was about the history of “innovation” as a lever for reform in the School District of Philadelphia. I spent months in archives around the city trying to piece together an account of the district’s Office of Innovative Programs, which opened in 1967 and continued to exist, under slightly different names, for a decade or so. “Innovation” at the time meant something pretty different than it does today. In the midst of the Cold War, the U.S. was trying to build up its infrastructure for innovative research and development, and school systems were seen as an important building block in doing so. As a result, federal funds flowed to cities like Philadelphia that were willing to build experimental schools that would use cutting edge instructional techniques and technologies to improve student learning.
In doing this research, what was striking to me were some of the similarities in the innovative strategies being touted by schools. University City High School, which opened as part of the district’s Innovation Office in 1971, had open classroom structures that looked a lot like makerspaces, they had audio-visual libraries to support students in self-directed learning, and they even used competency-based grading. It was also a complete disaster, and it pivoted from this model just two months after opening, in part, due to complaints from students, parents, and teachers.
To me, this is instructive in a few ways. First, it says that many of the innovative ideas that purport to be new aren’t so. In fact, a point I make in the book is that if something was truly innovative — like, something we’d never seen before — it would probably be too foreign for us to even be able to recognize it as an “innovation” at all. It would just be weird. Second, just because innovations have historical precedents, that doesn’t mean that their effects are predetermined. Implementing a similar “innovation” in a Philadelphia high school, 50 years apart, will have very different outcomes because the people, places, and cultural context are different. That doesn’t mean it will be better or worse; it just means that there are layers and layers of contingencies involved any time we’re playing around with an educational innovation.
I find this to be humbling, in a productive way. Since we never know how an innovation will take root, we need to be really thoughtful about which ones we experiment with at all, and if we choose to do so, we need to be attentive not only to the imperatives it introduces, but also to the different ways that people respond to those imperatives. Some people may adapt their practices to accommodate them; some people may resist them — and there is a lot to learn about how innovations work, and for whom, from studying these responses. But we miss all of those details when we overlook the force of imperatives altogether.
JP: Yes, so maybe we need some humility. We need to recognize that we don't get to choose the outcomes. We're always constrained actors to some degree.
We’ve gone deep into the weeds here and I’d like to zoom out a bit. You mentioned that some educators have used this book in professional learning, which is exciting! As you see educators picking up this book, what do you hope is the lasting message that they take from it?
PN: I think one message is this point we were just touching on. That we should have some humility when we hear about some new innovation that, we are told, is poised to transform education as we know it. We should harbor some doubts about these promises and we should have some resources to break down their assumptions so we can determine if, and to what extent, these innovations will move us closer or further away from our larger pedagogical goals.
This is related to another point that I make in the book which is that public education itself is an innovation. It is one of those innovations that was so groundbreaking that we don’t even think of it as an innovation any more. But it is! If public education did not exist, and someone just proposed the idea of creating 10,000 locally controlled, publicly-funded school networks equipped with buildings and personnel and technology, and so on, they would be laughed out of the room. For evidence, we need not look further than the hundreds of millions of dollars that are currently being spent to dismantle and privatize this innovation.
If we can hold onto this bigger view of innovation — that public education itself is the innovation — then that changes our perspective for how we make decisions about what other smaller-scale innovations we adopt. Since we already have one of the most radical educational innovations ever created, we don’t need to be reactive to every new innovation that someone tries to peddle. When Google or OpenAI pushes out products or services to schools, we have no obligation to use these innovations, or to reinvent our existing infrastructures to accommodate them. Educators should feel empowered to make decisions that are driven by the values embedded in the larger project of public education, not the growth projections of edtech futures markets or the tech workforce.
JP: That’s an optimistic outlook!
PN: I'm a very hopeful person.